Donald Newlove is the author of Leo and Theodore and
The Drunks, novels published by Saturday Review Press in 1973 and
'74, respectively, and republished together in paperback as Sweet
Adversity by Avon Books in '78. These works tell the story of alcoholic
Siamese twins who play jazz in trad bands in the '30s, then arrive on the
Lower East Side of New York in the early '60s. One of the two -- Theodore,
who also stutters and walks with canes -- decides to enter a 12 step program
and sober up.

Hilarious, gut-wrenching, verbally lyrical and very well received when they
first were issued, these books are now out of print and rather hard to find,
as are Newlove's other novels: The Painter Gabriel, Eternal Life, Curanne
Trueheart, and his "life study" Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other
Writers. His celebration of dialogue from novels and the movies,
Invented Voices is still available (from Henry Holt); he's also written
First Paragraphs, selected from world literature, and Painted
Paragraphs, about descriptive prose.

Newlove lives in Greenwich Village -- within sight of the
Jefferson Market tower that's on the cover of Eternal Life. On the
day of the JJA on-line chat he was on Cape Cod -- but anyway, he said he
was reluctant to go on-line, that he's not been impressed by the level of
discourse and fears being further distracted from his main activity,
writing. But he didn't mind if I wrote up some notes.

"I can only think of about three examples of writing that
works as music," Newlove said over the phone. "Kerouac's The
Subterraneans reads like bop prose, which proves to be pretty hard to
sustain. The first three or four pages of it sound like Lester Young playing
saxophone -- the long run-on sentences. Of course Kerouac was conscious of
that.

"Then there's an excerpt from Joyce, the chapter in
Ulysses that begins 'Bronze by gold steely ringing." It's about a
waitress in the window of a cafe, who hears a horse going by; that phrase
describes the hoof irons. There's also the novel Napoleon Symphony,
by Anthony Burgess: that imitates music. But a reader's interest in such
imitation drops almost instantly.

"With Joyce, you go along with it for the many rewards.
With Jack -- well, I was there when it was published, so the novelty of it
and immediacy kept me interested. But he only created one character, Dean
Moriarity in On The Road, and that was it. None of his other books
have a Dean Moriarity, you know?

"Maybe giving the sense of music is easier in poetry. . .
Vachel Lindsay's 'The Congo,' with the stanza endings 'boomlay, boomlay,
boomlay, BOOM!'
-- that's nice! I memorized that when I was in ninth grade."

Newlove has just finished revisions on his next novel,
The Wolf Who Swallowed The Sun, which isn't yet sold. Is he still
involved with jazz? Sure! He also keeps his trumpet at hand -- and played a
few bars of pure melody over the phone at the end of our conversation. --
Howard Mandel